Mr. Bloom

Mr. Bloom

General Information

Real name:

Unknown

First Appearance:

Batman Vol 2 #43 (October, 2015)

Created by:

Scott Snyder

Greg Capullo

Abilities:

Claws

Superhuman agilityElasticitySuperhuman strength

"Say it. "Damn all of them. There's only me." Say it. Say it! Because the city was built on divisions. Dead flower dolls. Gotham isn't a garden! It never was! It's a wild, bloody meadow! So stop wasting your lives! Don't take the pennies! Come to the land of giants! Go get what's yours get it! And let what's here die as it should, and grow something wonderful in it's place! "

―Mr. Bloom

Mr. Bloom was a Batman villain introduced as the nemesis of Jim Gordon's Batman.

Technically the second super-criminal to take up the mantle of Mister Bloom, the original Mister Bloom was a scientist with good-intentions named Daryl Gutierrez who after the events of Gotham's Zero Year began work on a breed of high-tech nanotech reactors he called "seeds" which gave their users randomized superpowers in hopes of making more superheroes like Batman. Daryl gave up the alias of Bloom after his cousin Pete Duggio used a seed to turn into a winged vigilante, only to be gunned down by a scared police-officer. Years later after the events of Joker's Endgame, Daryl (now a high-end engineer working at Powers International) began working on the seeds again with one of his patients whom, after developing superpowers and going rogue, steals all of the doctor's seeds and the alias of Mr. Bloom.

Taking up shop in Gotham after the original Batman Bruce Wayne who had died in the caves underneath Gotham fighting the Joker. Bloom was a power-broker who dealt his seeds to criminals which when implanted into their bodies caused the user to receive super-human powers at the expense of the seeds killing the host not long after. Bloom was similar to a weed, he fed off of Gotham's citizens's contempt and disdain for their meek way of life in a broken system, selling them superpowers in order to make them realize their darker sides. After giving superpowers to criminals like Precious Precious and Qi Tsu, Bloom came into conflict with the Penguin who attempted to kill Bloom before he could become to powerful only for Bloom to survive getting shot in the head and murder all of Penguin's men as well as impaling Penguin on his elongated claw, not killing him however.

Snyder has stated that he conceived the character as being an anti-Joker. The reasoning behind this being that while Joker's identity is left unrevealed as no backstory would be grand enough to fit him, while part of Bloom's appeal was that he could come from anywhere.